


Everything Always

by moosesal



Category: Hard Core Logo (1996)
Genre: Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-26 08:45:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moosesal/pseuds/moosesal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>History for the boys and follow-up post-canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything Always

**Author's Note:**

> Written for: spuffyduds in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge
> 
> Thanks so much to ldthomps and brandil for beta work on this. To the author -- I didn't really deliver on the hot sex part, but I hope you enjoyed this anyway. This definitely came from somewhere deep.

They were thirteen when they met and from the beginning Billy knew there was something different about Joe. Something different about their friendship. Different from what he'd known with other kids. Joe came over to listen to records and hang out for an afternoon. They holed themselves up in Billy's room, record player spinning _Kick Out the Jams_ ; Joe pulled a skin mag out of his jacket -- _Hustler,_ stolen from his dad -- and everything changed.

They looked at the pictures together, Joe stopping at a spread of a woman with a dick in her mouth and her own hand halfway up her cunt. Joe undid his pants and pulled his dick out. He was hard and jerking himself off, eyes fixed on the picture. Billy didn't really like the chick in the picture, but he was getting hard too. He pressed the heel of his hand to his crotch, feeling the stiff metal of the zipper between his palm and his dick, and suppressed a moan.

Joe kept staring at the picture, slowly stroking himself, and Billy thought maybe this was okay, maybe this was what guys did together, what friends did together. He worked his own pants open and down his hips a little to give himself room and he started pumping into his fist, slow and loose. He stared at the picture, but his thoughts were anywhere and everywhere else. He glanced out of the corner of his eye to see what Joe was doing and found Joe looking at him, looking in a way that freaked Billy out a little.

He wasn't freaked because Joe was a guy. And it wasn't that Joe was looking at him instead of the girl with her hand up her snatch. What freaked him out, what left him unsettled in a way he'd never experienced before, was _how_ Joe was watching him. Billy wished for a moment that Joe was looking at his dick or something because then he could just bump his shoulder and call him a faggot and make some comment about Joe picking the magazine spread because of the dick instead of the chick.

But Joe wasn't looking at Billy's dick or his hand.

Joe was looking at Billy's face. At his eyes and his mouth and his throat. And there was this intensity that no thirteen-year-old boy anywhere could ever be ready for. Billy wasn't sure he'd ever be ready for that look. But from that day on, he saw it more and more often on Joe's face.

Billy closed his eyes and touched himself and listened to Joe's breathing quicken and a few minutes later they both came in their hands, silent and still, magazine forgotten.

 

 ***

 

If it weren't for Bucky, Billy never would have come back. He was in a real band now, with a real future. He was a musician. He had talent -- and not just for a last name. He was something, he was _somebody_. He didn't need Hard Core Logo. He didn't need Pipe or John. And he sure as hell didn't need Joe. Not now. He wasn't sure if he ever had.

Okay, that was a lie. He'd needed Joe all those years growing up, needed that look that told Billy he was the center of somebody's world. That he mattered. The way Joe had fucked him (and fucked him over) had made him who he was.

So as they drove from Saskatoon to Edmonton, Pipe and John up front, Billy wasn't really surprised to find himself curled up on the floor of the van with Joe, talking and whispering and touching. Head pillowed on his guitar case, an amp poking him in the back. The two of them curled up in a pile of coats and duffle bags and a random dirty sock, trying to escape the cold coming up through that damn hole in the floorboard of that beat-up old deathtrap carrying them over frozen roads to their next gig. To their next performance. To their next handjob or blowjob or quick fuck in a dirty bar bathroom.

For a moment Billy wondered what the fuck he was doing, what he'd been thinking when he'd said yes. Then Joe's fingers ghosted over a tiny sliver of skin exposed at his waist, his thermal shirt pulled loose from his ratty jeans. Joe's fingers were warm and rough, callused from guitar strings, from whatever odd jobs he'd been doing to get by between shitty solo gigs, from years past of sliding over Billy's taught flesh.

Like so many times before, the touch was unwanted and welcome all at once. Without moving, Billy pressed back into it, into Joe, and closed his eyes. He didn't speak, he didn't touch, he didn't move, he just lay there and let Joe do whatever he wanted to. What he needed to. Behind closed eyes, Billy returned that look from so many years ago and when Joe's hand slid lower, Billy didn't say no.

Nothing had changed. Everything was different now.

 

*** 

 

It was snowing when they presented Joe's mom with the ashes. The whole thing had been hard for her, having her son take his own life. She'd looked at Billy with an intensity that was all too familiar to him. "He loved you," she said, staring hard before shoving the urn into his hands and then moving away, not pausing to look back for even a second.

He held onto the urn for months, unable to deal with his grief. It was all so unreal. Joe would always be there, wanting him. It was a given.

It was over.

Months later, Billy flew from LAX up to Vancouver International and started the long drive to Calgary then Regina and on to that bar in Winnipeg that was still closed down. He hesitated at the turn to Bucky's place then kept going; even with Joe gone, Billy didn't really feel welcome back there. Straight on to Saskatoon and eventually Edmonton after leaving bits of ash here and there along the way. Mixed in with his cigarette butts in a bar ashtray while knocking back shots of bourbon. Rubbed into the dirty grout on the bathroom floor of a gas station where they'd kneeled in turn, exchanging quick blowjobs before loading up on fuel and caffeine and getting back on the road. Sprinkled along the side of the road where they'd stopped to piss two hours later when all that coffee'd run through them.

He had just a handful left when he got to that spot on the sidewalk still stained with blood. It was Joe's birthday; Billy thought back to years past when they'd get trashed together and jerk each other off then ignore it the next day. He thought of birthdays apart, after he'd left the band and how he'd still toast Joe in silence and stare at a picture he had of them when they were just kids, standing in front of a Christmas tree with guitars and dreaming of being stars. Joe talking about Bucky Haight, but really wanting to be Iggy Pop and later Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten. Billy seeing himself as the perfect mix of Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix with a little Mick Jones thrown in. They were going to change the world with their music.

The only thing they'd changed was each other.

 

*** 

 

Billy sprinkled those remaining ashes on a sidewalk -- _that_ sidewalk -- and a wind came out of nowhere, disturbing the calm, swirling around him. Ashes danced at his feet and flew up onto his clothes and into his hair. He squeezed his eyes closed and tried to hold his breath, but it was too late. He had ash in his nose and his mouth and he coughed and laughed. That fucker'd always pushed his way inside Billy -- in his space, in his body, in his heart. The tears he'd been holding back since that night finally came choking out of him, tearing him apart. He felt it down to his bones, to his soul.

"I love you, too, mother fucker."


End file.
